Tagged Unions and Datatypes

In addition to struct, enum, and union, Cyclone provides @tagged union and datatype declarations as ways to construct new aggregate types. Like a union type, each @tagged union and datatype has a number of variants (or members). Unlike conventional unions, an object of a @tagged union or datatype type is exactly one variant, we can detect (or discriminate) that variant at run-time, and the language prevents using an object as though it had a different variant.

The difference between @tagged unions and datatypes is that the former look and behave much like traditional unions, whereas the latter look and behave more like the algebraic datatypes found in functional languages such as ML. Furthermore, datatypes can be either closed or @extensible. A closed datatype’s members are specified all together when the datatype is declared, whereas an @extensible datatype supports adding new members after the fact (much like adding a new sub-class to a class-based OO language.)

• Tagged Unions
• Datatypes
• The Tagof Operator
• Extensible Datatypes